


all my days i'll know your face

by 40millionyears



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Gen, Pre-Series, Timeline What Timeline, troperrific
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 02:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2371928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/40millionyears/pseuds/40millionyears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>four universes in which everything is the same at the nine-nine, except that soulmates are a thing. four times jake and amy definitely weren’t those soulmates. nope. not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all my days i'll know your face

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry it came to this. 
> 
> let's assume this universe also swallowed a few select things from the end of season one: no teddy, no going undercover, no confession, no strict canonical timeline. definitely nothing to do with season two. there are still romantic-stylez feelings, though. obviously.

**one**  
 _(where you know it the first time you touch them)_  
  
  
Amy’s determined to make a good impression on her first day at the Nine-Nine. She knows from her research that most of the squad has been together for a fairly long time, and she wants to fit in. Wants to do well.  
  
She meets Captain McGinley (not her _first_ choice for a career role model slash mentor, but she’ll make do), and a terrifying leather-clad detective named Rosa, and the surprisingly gentle Sergeant, who directs her to an empty desk with a welcoming smile.  
  
“You’re here, opposite Detective Peralta. He’ll also be your partner, at least to begin with. He should be back soon.”  
  
Amy surveys the shambolic workspace in front of her, strewn with army figurines and Rubik’s cubes and empty coffee cups atop the rare piece of actual official police paperwork, and takes a deep breath.  
  
 _Good impression,_ she reminds herself.  
  
As she’s settling in, deciding exactly how to arrange her folders, a tall, curly-haired man all but bounces into the bullpen, badge thumping against his chest on its chain as he high fives the shorter man who’d introduced himself as Charles. His smiles grows wider when he spots her, shedding his leather jacket and flinging it onto the back of the desk chair opposite hers.  
  
“New partner alert!” he crows, brown eyes alight with good humour, and this is the part where Amy would usually take an instant disliking to him, except that something about his enthusiasm is strangely endearing.  
  
“Hi, I’m Jake Peralta, brilliant crime solver and retired runway model,” he says.  
  
“Amy Santiago,” she replies, extending her hand out to him with a composed smile.  
  
He takes it, and all of a sudden it’s like a bolt of lightning crashing through her, a freight train exploding into too-bright colours that expand to make the whole world turn white and fuzzy. She feels something spark and coalesce between them, the last piece of a puzzle falling into place.  
  
Amy doesn’t remember closing her eyes, but when she opens them, the civilian administrator is grinning deviously from her desk in front of the captain’s office, and Charles is clasping his hands together with unbridled glee, and Detective Pera— _Jake,_ Jake is looking wide-eyed at her, his expression caught somewhere between dazed and amazed and petrified.  
  
He hasn’t let go of her hand.  
  
 _Well,_ she thinks, once she’s able to think at all. _That’s an impression._  
  


 **two**  
 _(where you know it the first time you kiss them)_  
  
  
Jake’s a little surprised that the Captain invited them back to his house a second time after the complete failure that had been his birthday party, but the Holt/Cozner Officially-Non-Denominational-Even-Though-There’s-Totally-A-Huge-Christmas-Tree-And-Tasteful-Holly-Everywhere fiesta was in full and merry swing. The squad had upped their adult-party game since their last outing, and were for the most part successfully interacting with the Captain’s other guests.  
  
He didn’t know what Boyle had put in the eggnog (or, more likely, what _Gina_ had slipped into it while no one was looking), but it was doing the trick. Slyly excusing himself from a conversation about film theory in which he’d invented all the theorists he was quoting, his tongue loose and his spirits high, he finds Amy rifling through a drawer in the kitchen.  
  
“I’m disappointed, Santiago. Didn’t we learn our lesson about snooping and whatnot last time?”  
  
She straightens and turns to face him, waving a stack of napkins in his direction. “I was looking for these. Charles spilled chilli relish on himself in his haste to get to the charcuterie plate.”  
  
“Well, by all means,” he yields, gesturing for her to pass. “That stuff’ll leave a stain.”  
  
He starts to trail after her, heading back towards the library, when his gaze drift upwards and he lets out a small chortle. He can’t resist the urge to pull her pigtails, just a little, not in this particular scenario.  
  
“Amy, wait.”  
  
“Jake, I know you made John Gruber up, I don’t need to hear his fake ideas about structuralism.”  
  
“Amy.”  
  
“ _What?!”_  
  
She looks back over her shoulder at him in exasperation, stopped in the doorway, and follows his gaze. They’re standing under the jauntiest sprig of mistletoe he’s ever seen.  
  
“No, Peralta.”  
  
“Santiago, the fates have spoken. Who are we to argue with them?”  
  
She laughs. “Are you sure you and the fates speak the same language?”  
  
“I mean, I think it’s actually just the law. And law breaking is taken very seriously amongst this particular company. Except by Kevin. Don’t talk to Kevin abo—”  
  
“You know we can just step out from under it, right?”  
  
“Amy Santiago!” he gasps in theatrical outrage. “Mistletoe kissing is an iron-clad tradition that must not be ignored. I’ve already beaten up Santa, do you _want_ to anger the Christmas gods any further?”  
  
She rolls her eyes at him. “You’re Jewish, and someone clearly needs to confiscate your eggnog. But if it’ll shut you up… Merry Christmas, butthead,” she says, and inclines her head as he leans down to claim a quick, victorious peck.  
  
He sobers up the second her lips touch his.  
  
The same second, his heart stutters, and he suspects that the mistletoe and the house and everything in the entire world save for the two of them cease to exist for a moment, or maybe a lifetime. He suddenly feels too big for his own skin, like a part of her has crawled in there with him and he can’t do anything except find a way to make them both fit, forever.  
  
He deepens the kiss on pure instinct, wrapping an arm around her to keep her with him. He’d known this would happen one day, of course. He’d known his other half was out there the way he knew that the sky was blue; your soulmate’s existence, and how to find them, was just a fact of life. But it was a fact that had always been theoretical.  
  
No one had warned him that it would feel this… much. Hollow and full all at once.  
  
They pull apart, and the world rebuilds itself around them. She looks at him for a long beat, open-mouthed and speechless, and manages to mumble something unintelligible before rushing off, napkins still clenched and crumpled in her hand.  
  
He slumps back against the kitchen counter.  
  
 _It’s Amy,_ he muses, turning the revelation over and over in his head until it starts to make sense. _It’s Amy._ And it does. It does. The teasing and the bickering and the genuine affection… he gets it now. _It’s Amy.  
  
_ _It had_ always _been Amy.  
  
_ _Okay._  
  
He finds her sitting halfway up the staircase – in another clear violation of the prominently-posted ‘please stay downstairs’ sign - just out of view from the living room.  
  
“Room for a fellow rule-violator up there?”  
  
“Hey,” she says quietly. “Sorry I kind of ran away there.”  
  
“Amy, look, it’s not— I mean, if you don’t— I’m sure there’s a way to…”  
  
She shakes her head emphatically. “What? No, I’m just... I’m freaking out. I think we should be freaking out. How are you not freaking out?”  
  
He lowers himself onto the stair next to her, their knees bumping together.  
  
“I don’t know. I guess because… you’re you? I know you, Santiago. You’re a terrible cook and you smoke shame cigarettes and you’ve got about eleven thousand people in your immediate family and you make me laugh and you like being a cop. It’s a little weird, but… there’s gotta be way worse people out there to have as my soulmate.”  
  
She smiles, just a little, and he sees a bit of the tension leave her shoulders, her face soften. She relaxes against him, and they sit in silence for a while.  
  
“The fates have spoken, huh?” she says eventually.  
  
He stands, grabbing her hand to help her up, and presses his lips to her hair before she can react. “I think it’s actually the law,” he replies, and she responds by leaning ever so slightly into his shoulder, the touch of her skin ghosting over his own.  
  
“Besides,” he adds with a quirk of his lips, as he moves to lead them back out into the party, “you can’t back out now. I’ve kind of been waiting for you my whole life.”  
  
  


 **three**  
 _(where matching marks on your bodies appear when you turn 13)  
  
_ The marks are A Big Deal; they’re a guarantee, more or less, that someone out there is honour-bound to put up with you for the long haul. People who had found their marked match all say the same thing: the minute you know, you _know_. Everything falls into place; your whole life, past and future, is fathomable in a single moment.  
  
Jake had demanded to know about Gina’s the second the clock struck midnight on her birthday, and breathed a sigh of relief when her mark didn’t resemble his in the slightest. He loved Gina like a sister, then and now, but being soul-bound to her for life would have been a special circle of hell he would never have been prepared for. Other than that, he’d never given the little, vaguely umbrella-shaped blotch on his side much thought. It was a puzzle with only two pieces. Easiest solve in the world.  
  
(He did, however, scour any Playboys and Vogues he came across for any trace of a model with a matching blotch. Just in case. And for her part, Gina either sought out men who weren’t concerned with this whole single soulmate business, or coloured and reshaped her mark to match those of the men who were. It worked sometimes.)  
  
By now, Jake knows most of the Nine-Nine team’s marks. Scully and his wife have a perfect circle on one knuckle. Rosa has a constellation of star-like shapes on her shoulder that he’d glimpsed during a training session at the Academy. Gina’s looks oddly like her own silhouette.  
  
Over a year into their partnership, he’s never seen Amy’s. She’d once accidentally revealed that it looked like a type of vegetable, and he’d spent the next month spamming her inbox with pictures of every vegetable he could think of with a question mark, so. He can’t really blame her for keeping it quiet.  
  
They’re spending the day in the records room, searching for any scrap of relevant information to assist in a rapidly-cooling double homicide case. Amy’s standing on a stepladder, digging around in the very recesses of the haphazard-at-best file storage system. Reaching for a box at the very back of the shelf, the bottom hem of her shirt pulls away just enough to reveal a slice of skin, and there it is. A half-inch long misshapen umbrella, dark brown and slightly raised, a perfect complement to his own.  
  
His eyes widen as its significance dawns on him, and somewhere, another two names are crossed off an immutable list.  
  
“You know, Peralta, this would be so much easier if you were actually hel—”  
  
She twists around to continue chastising him and sees the direction of his stare.  
  
“Ugh,” she says, tugging her shirt back down. “Fine, now you know, it’s an ugly mushroom. If you see a man out there with a matching ugly mushroom, please don’t ever speak to him or acknowledge that you know me, cause I kinda need this one to work out.”  
  
A slow grin spreads across his face. _Easiest solve in the world._  
  
“I don't know where your gigantic glasses are, Santiago, but that’s not a mushroom. It’s totally an umbrella.”  
  
“What? It’s not— it’s a mushroom. You’ve probably just never seen an actual mushroom, since they’re not made of candy.”  
  
“Okay, well then that’s where I’ve been going wrong this whole time. I had no idea how to describe a mushroom,” he says, still looking at her with a disbelieving grin on his face, and untucks his shirt to reveal his own umbrella-or-mushroom.  
  
He tries not to take offence at the way her face visibly pales, the file in her hand spilling onto the floor.  
  
“What… what is that?”  
  
“Well, I’m not a doctor, but I _think_ it’s a mushroomy-umbrellay-spoldgey-thing that matches your mushroomy-umbrellay-spoldgey-thing.”  
  
She shakes her head, climbing down off the ladder.  
  
“No. Nope. No. This is not happening, this is not funny. Go wash that off.”  
  
“Amy, newly found light of my life, I’m hurt. It’s stuck there for good. Like you are now. With me. Oh my god, I have to go tell everyone. Do you think the Captain will officiate our wedding?”  
  
“Jake _,”_ and there’s a pleading-cum-warning note in her voice that he thinks he should probably abide.    
  
“Right, okay, sorry. But this is, I mean, we… you know, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” she says, and finally smiles back at him. “That's kinda how it works. I _know._ But it's a lot to know, and this isn’t really a great time or place to deal with all of this knowing.”  
  
“So I should cancel the giant self-congratulatory banner I just pocket-ordered?”  
  
“Peralta. If anybody finds out before I say it’s okay, I promise you I will have Rosa murder you and hide your body.”  
  
“Roger that, darling,” he says, backing away from her with a cocky smirk on his face and his hands raised, palms outwards, in a gesture of mock surrender.  “And look at that, it seems this’s just the file we need to crack this case. Lessgo!”  
  
He picks it up off the floor, spins on his toes, and saunters out of the records room, intentionally giving her one last flash of that coffee-coloured seal of fate as he does. And because the sheer ridiculousness of the whole situation is tempered somewhat by its equally absolute inevitability, she follows him.  
  
On their way back to the bullpen, he sings “you belong with me-ee-eeeee” just loudly enough for her to hear it, and doesn’t even flinch at the dark glare she throws his way.  
  
“You can’t harm this face, Santiago,” he tells her as they sit at their respective desks, smile as wide as she’s ever seen it. “Because this one is gonna work out. You have to look at this face for the rest of your life. This is the face you _looove._ ”  
  
Amy heaves the first of what she knows will be many long-suffering sighs to come. “I’m okay with a bit of bruising,” she decides, and throws her stapler at him. 

 _  
  
_ **four**  
 _(where it’s super rare and doesn’t happen for most people)_  
  
  
Amy Santiago grew up knowing a number of things for certain: she was always going to get the smallest piece of anything at dinner until she got strong enough to fork-wrestle Luis for a better one, Jesus was watching you whether you wanted him to be or not, and most people didn’t have a soulmate.   
  
The girls at school would spend recesses bemoaning this last fact, inventing elaborate stories that put them among those lucky chosen few, as though their lives would be half-lived if they weren’t destined for this grand and rare romantic twist of fate. Amy was more pragmatic about the whole affair. After all, her parents weren’t soulmates, and look at _them._ Twenty-seven years of marriage, eight children, and more kitchen PDA than an eleven year old should ever have to witness.  
  
So, if like the majority of people in the world, there wasn’t a soulmate out there waiting for her… so what? That was normal. There were lots of other ways to be happy. Even in fifth grade, Amy knew that she’d have way better things to do with her life than to plan it around the remote possibility of a universally-approved other half; and so, she mostly gets on with living that life.   
  
(And if she did very occasionally let herself daydream about what it would be like to be soul-matched to someone – to one day, when you were ready, see your life together flash before you and know that at that exact moment they were seeing it too - well, that was normal as well.)

Eighteen years later, the Nine-Nine team are at Shaw’s celebrating the successful solve of a month-long kidnapping case. Amy is just over the edge of tipsy, crowded into a booth with Rosa and Gina, watching an equally-tipsy Jake hustle a completely-smashed Boyle at a game of pool. An unexpected flush of warmth for her partner comes over her, a flush that makes her cheeks burn and her toes tingle, but she dismisses it as a combination of alcohol and the goodwill she always feels towards him when they close a case together.  
  
In the year-and-a-half that they’ve been paired up, Amy has wanted to murder Jake so often that she actually has a half-concocted plan for doing so. She’s had to apologise for him more times than she can count, had numerous dates and her good pink dress ruined by him, and has been the subject of his teasing and pranks an unfairly (she feels) large proportion of the time.  
  
But on nights such as this, with her team around her and five children safely returned to their parents and red wine warm in her stomach, she remembers that none of those homicidal moments are enough to outweigh the fact that she likes having him as her partner.  
  
Jake raises his pool cue over his head in victory, and she hides her grin as Gina throws peanuts at him.  
  
The early hours of the following morning are when she dreams her future for the first time, a whirlwind of colour and light and happiness peppered with memories she knows but hasn’t yet made. There’s takeout and make-outs on her couch; there’s Jake in a tux, beaming at her down an aisle lined with flowers; there’s a Captain’s badge and raucous Christmas dinners and a giggling little boy with curly hair and big brown eyes.  
  
She startles awake with a muffled gasp.  
  
“Shit.”  
  
At 7.34am, she gets seven text messages in quick succession.  
  
“don’t pretend like you didn’t see yourself eating all the kung pao chicken too, santiago. that’s not cool, whats yours is mine”  
  
“amy I don’t know if you want to wear a strapless wedding dress, it’s very overdone even if you do have good shoulders”  
  
“but seriously”  
  
“amy”  
  
“this means what i think it means right”  
  
"amy"  
  
"i think it's gonna be okay"  
  
And finally a snapchat of him holding their Vulture-victory picture with a goofy grin, a big red love heart surrounding their faces.  
  
The day is already shaping up to be a murderous one, she can tell. He’s going to be _unbearable.  
  
_ (She's looking forward to it). _  
  
  
  
_ **four and a half**  
 _(where it doesn’t really matter how the universe leads you to them, just that it does)_  
  
  
They could start in any number of ways, at any number of times, but they always end in one.  
  
Takeout and make-outs on her couch (they always get two serves of kung pao chicken, because while they’ve gotten good at sharing most things, certain Chinese foods aren’t among them).  
  
Jake in a tux, beaming at her down an aisle lined with flowers (it takes him a good 20 minutes to notice whether her dress has straps or not; he's a little overwhelmed).  
  
A Captain’s badge (on her thirty-seventh birthday) and raucous Christmas dinners (his mom, her entire family, and usually a couple of stray Nine-Niners, old and new), and a giggling little boy with curly hair and big brown eyes.  
  
The one constant that makes up all the other constants is this: they never try to fight it. 

**Author's Note:**

> \+ this was meant to be five universes, but... well, it's just four.  
> \+ my lil headcanon here is that jake already has feelings for amy, so he's various levels of chill about finding out about the whole 'amy is his soulmate' thing, whereas amy... is less so.  
> \+ big kisses to my poetic and noble land mermaid **kasuchi** for dealing with and encouraging this ridiculous mess.  
>  \+ shout-out to [this post](http://thegeminisage.tumblr.com/post/94680598838) for providing inspiration.  
> \+ and yes, the title is from a Taylor Swift song, because she makes me and Jake feel things.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] All My Days I'll Know Your Face](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13219644) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




End file.
